Thursday, March 3, 2011

Ladies Who Lunch: Dish

Today was scheduled to be the much anticipated Cafe Aion, but the forces of darkness worked against me. The first problem was that I only blocked an hour off my calendar and ended up with meetings scheduled right up to noon and starting again at 1:00. Not enough time to speed across town, park, order, eat and get back. The second force of darkness was what we in the IT field call a TOTAL NIGHTMARE. That's the technical term for when you finally get a bunch of users in your new system and everything crashes, and 50 people send you a message about it, and 49 of those messages say, "I am seeing the same problem, can you email me when it's fixed?" If Bill Gates were to do one thing for humanity, it would be do remove the Reply All button from Microsoft Outlook.

Fortunately, I used my mad troubleshooting skillz to determine that the DATA disk group wasn't mounted on RAC02, and it was operator error (not mine) and it was fixed around 12:15 (as my 11-12 meeting ended) at which point I sent an email that all was well and was shortly seen fleeing from the building.

What to do, what to do, when you have Cafe Aion on the brain and 30 minutes for lunch? Well, we just went to the next place on the illustrious list of places where Ladies want to Lunch.

Of course, we didn't decide that on the spot, I had plan B in my back pocket all along, and I instructed Laura to study the menu and plan ahead so as not to waste time in line. But I couldn't decide what I wanted. The Piglet? Cute/horrifying name. BLAT? So predictable/delicious? Salad? Too diet friendly. I was a little amped up on caffeine and Laura suggested that maybe I needed a trip to the ladies room, but I insisted it was just stress and coffee that was making me so annoyingly jittery. I decided to get half an Italian sandwich, and made a spur of the moment decision to upgrade from chips to a side salad.

My sandwich was really good, especially the mozz and pepperoni part. The ambiance, on the other hand, was terrible. But that was probably because we went back to work and ate in the break room. Dish has a few places to sit, but we didn't have time to linger, and if we did, people waiting for their to-go lunch would have been standing right by our table talking about RAC02, and being jittery. But we enjoyed eating together even when Randy Randoms walked through the break room and bugged us. I was a little worried because with 2 bites of my half sandwich to go, I was still starving. But by the time I finished my salad, I felt like I might live. Then I ate a random muffin from the break room leftover table, so I can't say for sure if the lunch was filling enough.

Laura had the Bloody Good Salad, which looked good, if you are the type of person who likes hard boiled eggs, and an M&M cookie, which she said was gooey and had lots of sugar and almond extract, and was sooo good. I have to admit, I am sort of fantasizing about that cookie right now.